


with respect, i must decline

by propergoffic



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Flashbacks, Friendship, Other, Team Talon (Overwatch), he try - she gay, it's not even a slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-09-06 03:26:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20284615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/propergoffic/pseuds/propergoffic
Summary: Moira explains why, no matter how tempting it might be, she won't be the one brainwashing Subject Sigma.





	with respect, i must decline

_From the desk of Moira O’Deorain, PhD_

_Despite the attractive remuneration and due respect your proposal represents, I must — with equal respect — decline._

Moira rubs her forehead with the back of her hand. This should be easy enough. All she had to do was imagine. Project herself into a shadowy boardroom — Venice, possibly? Rio, maybe? — and imagine what they’d ask her. Someone — probably Sanjay, who didn’t understand anything on the small scale — would bring up her prior success in a similar project. Maximilian would agree, because everything was odds for and against to that metal bastard, and he’d need to be shown that his calculations were flawed. So:

_Project Widowmaker was in essence a destructive operation, revolving around one key imperative; the long-term stability of the subject was and continues to be a fringe benefit._

_Project Sigma, meanwhile, is a reconstructive operation. Stabilising Subject Sigma to the point of usefulness, let alone recovering the core personality and capabilities of Dr. De Kuiper, is an extensive exercise in physio- and psycho-therapy for which I lack either the aptitude or training._

And here, she thinks, Gabriel would lean in, and point out that black operations fieldwork is outside her core aptitude and training, as is medicine, and yet here they both are; still alive. So:

_Furthermore…_

And she hesitates, for a moment and a half, and she remembers.

* * *

She’d been twenty-eight. No longer freshly inducted to the robes-and-floppy-hat brigade, still proud enough to have her certificate on the wall. Eighteen months into her first post-doctoral position, and starting to wonder about the future. Not to worry, of course. There was no point in worrying about whether or not something would come up. She would ensure something came up.

It was the second day of the Pan-European Summit on the Human Future, with the delightful subtitle-before-title Crisis/Transcendence. She’d scoffed. But she’d also pressed to attend. Moira was fresh out of Trinity, with nothing and everything to prove, and she hadn’t been above pointing out that if the world was watching with its hands in its pocket, a six-foot redhead with a tendency to state her mind and damn the consequences would be eminently watchable. Funding bodies from all over the world would have representatives there; there was talk of a special UN task force that would take its direction and its first wave of scientific recruits off the back of this event; and Moira had been thinking about the future.

The panel had been competitive. Moira had been flying her own personal flag, yes; she’d also been representing the oldest institute of higher learning and research in Ireland; she’d also been speaking for her entire field, demonstrating to the best of her considerable ability that the future of humanity, the global-tier priority for the coming decades, lay primarily in the hands of geneticists, and not programmers or architects (or, for that matter, astrophysicists). But she couldn’t say that out loud. None of them could. So it was “make the hardest case you can for yourself, without actively running down anyone else; be polite, be civil, be respectful.” And in that regard, twenty years ago, Moira had been a little out of her depth.

Which is why she’d lost her patience, and thumped the table and demanded to know “why, exactly, should humanity pass up a chance to improve itself, to save itself, because some obsolete moral code or other deems the best method for the task unnatural?”

The room had murmured. Unconcerned with the personal opinions of others, Moira wasn’t stupid enough to think herself infallible, and she knew perfectly well she’d gone too far. It was… politically unsound.

She’d been surprised, therefore, at the cough from the end of the table. Siebren de Kuipers had been forty-two then, his widow’s peak still tenaciously holding out against the ravages of time. Representing the European Space Agency (and tacitly suggesting that the best thing for humanity was to leave its doomed homeworld before it was too late), Dr. De Kuipers’ position in the heartland of international politics and a breath from full professorship suggested exactly the kind of person who was going to do well out of this farrago. He was, in short, the competition, against whom Moira was fighting an uphill battle without admitting there was a battle going on at all.

She’d been very surprised at what he actually said.

“Dr. O’Deorain makes a compelling point.” He held up a calming palm to the chair, and by extension the room at large. “We are living in the year 2055, and yet there are people out there who still believe the world is flat. You may laugh,” and one or two of the audience certainly had, “but they exist. Would you have my organisation cease operations, simply because our work directly contradicts their beliefs? You would not. Would you ask the same of Dr. O’Deorain? If you would, I might suggest you interrogate your position closely, and ascertain why it is more defensible than others; if not for the intellectual merit of the process, then because the future of the planet is at stake.”

And afterwards, she’d asked him why he’d done it.

“Because I find them ridiculous,” he’d said. “A basic respect for the rights of the individual does not translate into a universal moral code, not with a world in crisis. Let people believe that the world is flat and their genetic code is sacrosanct if they must; I have no quarrel with fools. But to let fools buy and sell the destiny of the species? That I could never abide. Nor, I suspect, could you.” While he’d been speaking he’d plucked two glasses of something sparkly and far too lightweight for Moira’s liking from a tray that passed him by, and by the time Moira had quite processed what he’d said she’d had one in her hand. “_Proost_.”

“_Sláinte agatsa_,” she’d said, guessing correctly, and somewhat lost for words beyond that she’d drained her glass and he’d been called away.

* * *

Later, as the conference broke up in the usual way, ones and twos and fours and fives making their own arrangements, the central mass of people who had no people in particular to see drifting along together, they’d kept talking. This and that. Sounding one another out. Siebren, as he’d become by then, had met her Wilde with Marcellus Emants; commandeered the hotel bar’s piano and made a serviceable stab at Liszt — “Orpheus,” he’d said with a bow, “a prelude to a drama that sins not against good sense”; propped up the bar, declaiming with a statesman’s charm that the spirit of organic order must live even in the most technical, the most mathematical of disciplines, lest every being on the planet become oppressed. It had been a transparent attempt to sweep her off her feet, and Moira had allowed herself to be swept at least a little way.

Had there been something there, on her part? It was, she supposed, a theoretical possibility. Charisma and intellect were attractive forces, and for all that her preference did not customarily stretch in his direction, it would be unscientific to say never to anything. It was certainly possible. She’d been drunk enough to entertain it, sober enough to draw the line; he’d kissed her hand, a gentleman even in defeat.

“_Hoe had mijn ziel haar weerstand kunnen bieden?_” he’d said, and bowed her into the lift alone. And that, as she’d translated it on her holo back in her own room, alone, had been that.

* * *

_Furthermore, Dr. De Kuiper’s loyalty to the organisation could in my opinion be cemented by loyalty to an individual; an intellectual and social equal; a peer, one not complicit in the initial stages of direct control which, I imagine, he would come to resent._

And Akande would look at her, across the boardroom table, and sigh, and he’d say: “In plain English, Moira?”

And she would have to say: “I imagine he’d need a friend.”

**Author's Note:**

> Siebren is quoting "Lilith", by Marcellus Emants: "How could my soul have resisted it?"
> 
> I don't ship it. As such. But I can see the shape such a ship might have taken, if their circumstances were not as they are. Forgive my soft academic heart.


End file.
